As of pending version 4.223 of c9, a significant change will be made to c9.  An existing feature (deferred payments) will be completely removed and instead be replaced with an alternative and improved mechanism that achieves the same aim.

The primary purpose of this post is to alert dealers that use the deferred payments facility so that you are aware of the change before you upgrade.  Also this post will highlight how to solve an occasional spare parts selling arrangement: the ability to reserve stock for a cash customer, but not actually raise an invoice for the stock until they come in to receive the parts.

We try to avoid making significant changes to the software that modify the way the software is used for daily operation.  In this circumstance, we are of the view that the existing deferred payment system is broken and it weakens the c9 product so we taken the decision to remove it entirely from c9.    The primary reason why is that the solution is confusing and error prone and difficult to properly manage.  We instead went with a solution that merges behaviour of customer order processing so that the same process you use to process customer orders that have been received is the same process you use to process items placed on reserve.  This approach has numerous advantages which we hope will come clear to you as you use the new capability in c9.

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• Receive back ordered parts.  When receiving accessory parts also query user for supplier
• Synchronize MYOB/Quickbooks, do not attempt sync accessory received invoices where supplier is not know
• Configure labels, redesigned configure label screen so it is easier to configure for either A4 or dedicated labelling printers.

Bugfix.  When receiving orders, c9 is supposed to look at all active orders in the system and preferentially 'receive' parts for customer orders instead of restocking orders; without regard for numbering of original orders sent to supplier; i.e. a customer orders late, but a stock order is received with those parts : reassign those parts to the customer instead of stock.  Normally this works, but there is one rare situation where this reallocation would not occur and parts would go into stock instead of being allocated to the customer (customer parts would eventually be processed when those parts come in on later receive orders). This version fixes this rare situation.

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• View/Change part : add ability to move part to another franchise
• Naming convention change - 'master file' becomes 'price file'
• Naming convention change - 'odo' 'odometer' becomes 'odo/hour'
  • Note that most of code already did this but there were some key places in c9 that still referred to 'odometer'
• Minor visual/screen/naming tweaks
  • Hide status on select job
  • Rename max/min check to max check
  • Workshop other : remove images and access to 'other'. (Other is accessible via setup)
  • Workshop : hide items instead of disabling them where units package is installed
  • Account statements : rename couple of check boxes to remove some confusion about how this screen works

The holy grail of inventory control is the ability to forecast what customers are going to buy and when, order those parts from the supplier, and sell them to the customer before you pay the invoice to your supplier. And to never ever carry excess stock.

For 10 years or so now c8/c9 has offered some basic tooling that provides dealers an estimate of what stock re-order levels should be; i.e. max checker. It generates reasonable numbers based on analysing the sales figures for up to 12 months, but there are a number of things that cause it to generate poor results under some circumstances; such as sporadic/slow moving parts or seasonal stock.

With advent of c9 and some very powerful enabling technologies available to us, we are now exploring and testing more sophisticated statistical approaches to the problem of providing more material support to spare parts managers in their task of tuning restocking levels.  We are testing statistical models that encompass a dozen different variables and considerations, and we are tuning these models against 'flight simulators', that test how variation in different pre-set biases affect business profitability when it comes to stock control.

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• Remote network access changes
  • Ability to have 'local' configuration; such as local printers stored on the remote computer. The key setting we are interested in is cash till number.  So you are at a trade show, you configure the laptop at the show to have till number '90' then cash till report separates takings at the show and takings back at the shop.
    • Previously, remote network would use the 'local settings' on the terminal running messenger.  Now local settings are saved and managed on the remote client itself.
  • Text area fields (i.e. workshop job notes) would not properly refresh under some circumstances when accessing remotely. Now fixed.

Import Note about remote access: these changes mean that older versions of the software will no longer work via website access c9 remotely function. You need to upgrade to version 4.219 on c9 in the shop first.  Also for people who downloaded the client.jar file, this file needs to be re-downloaded.

• Shelf Labels. Align price on the left of the label. Dave reckons this way looks nicer.
• Enquiry Report - redesigned to be more useful
  • Sort items from most enquired to least
  • Show all parts, not just parts for a given franchise
  • Remove leading zero formatting
  • Show tally of total enquiries for past 12 months
• Sales history report - remove leading zero formatting.
• Dead stock report. Include option to show all parts. Also consider sales history incase min/max are incorrect.
• Historical inventory report. Add option: all. When all is selected a per franchise summary is printed (instead of printing every individual part)
• Parts on order report. Display spares invoice numbers and account codes
• Return spares. Do not put freeform items into stock!
• Prior version incorrectly removed ability to add freight to a factory unit purchase. Re-added in this version.
• Customer order query - accessible via F12.
• Customer order query - allow filter based on item status (active item/processed item). Default to active items only - i.e. to deal with more frequent customer query : "where are my parts?".
• Spares Reports - removed buy/sell report. Report is accessible from F6 view/change part and it makes more sense to access it from this location.
• Naming convention change: accounts to customers.
• Import price file.  If price file has an error in it (i.e. corrupt zip file), c9 previously could enter into an infinite loop.  Now fixed so c9 will report error with the file.

The c9 DMS platform provides us at c9 alot of capabilities to remotely provide support to your installation; the ability to run c9 remotely and the ability to access the c9 database means that the process of providing quick and useful support is usually as simple as phoning us up and explaining the problem and we take it from there.

Under some extra-ordinary circumstances although, the remote tools built into c9 may not be enough. Also you may wish to access your shop remotely for software other than c9; such as your accounting software.  For these circumstances you will require installation of additional software that allows you to gain complete remote control of one or more of your computers in the shop.  The preferred program we recommend is called 'logmein'. Following explains how to install logmein.

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This version will modify the database. You will be forced to log all terminals out as part of upgrade

• Select part (stock or master). Includes full text filter/search option.
• Generate VIN from framenumber if VIN is blank.  Last version did not do a good job of this. Fixed.
• Naming convention changes for units.
  • VIN is replaced with "Reference"
  • Frame Number is replaced with "VIN/HIN/Serial"
• Print Bar Codes: re-introduced ability to add parts by single franchise only. By default displays all parts irrespective of franchise, but there is a tab option to only deal with parts from a specific franchise.

This version will modify the database. You will be forced to log all terminals out as part of upgrade

• Workshop/Units - record on workshop whether dealership job is internal or presales.  If  presales then workshop line items are copied onto the units invoice at unit sale and passed onto customer as a cost.  Note that in sales, user can remove/modify these copied line items.
• Spares orders. Added ability to report on value of stock received on order but not yet picked up or put into stock at close of a day. To be used for inventory reporting come EOFY.  Does not work retrospectively.
• Receive Spares orders. Display a window which allows user to modify notification settings for individual invoices prior to performing actual notification
• Spares orders: advanced option which allows user to redo notification (i.e. similar to ability to reprint the receive report)
• Spares credit note. For a credit note with no parent invoice, default account/cash payout based on type of account selected. (Previously always defaulted to cash payout).
• Unit purchase tweaks
  • On detection of unit VIN which is already on file, auto-generated a unique recommended VIN by adding 'A'.. 'Z' to end of VIN
  • On entry of unit to purchase, detect at point of time VIN is keyed in whether or not there is already a unit on the invoice with the same VIN number (system currently only does this test after progressing past entry of purchase units)
  • If VIN is blank and Frame number is entered, default VIN to last 6 characters of the frame.
  • Factory purchase: disallow ability to set invoice/onroad costs. These can only be set on purcahses from a given account. Previously, c9 would simply ignore items such as this added onto a sale.
• Unit sale: select similar unit should not list units already on the invoice. i.e. for someone buying a whole bunch of similar type of units on a single invoice.
• Unit browser: under some circumstances c9 would incorrectly claim that no filter conditions had been selected and disallow execution  of the query.
• View Account Current units. Provide a 'add new unit' button
• Bug fix: if you set rounding in setup to zero, all rounded prices would come out as '0.00' no matter what. Added special handling so that a rounding value of zero means no rounding (functionally equivalent of setting rounding to 0.01)
• Monthly lease entry.  If you have two terminals open requesting monthly lease, you key successfully lease into one, and then on the other cancel entry of the lease, the successful entry of lease information is overwritten as though it was never keyed in. Fixed.
• Login : check and report differences between terminal date/time and date/time on database server.